Sunday, April 17, 2016

Christianity and the Axial Age

Nominal Christians think of the life of Jesus as being paradoxical.
According to the myths which are typically misread as historical narratives,
Jesus was miraculously born to a virgin and when he came of age, the Holy
Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove and he heard the voice of God
bless him. Jesus grew up and taught a radical message of peace, performed
numerous miracles, started a church that flourishes to this day, and was
resurrected after his physical death. His life is supposed to represent a
pivotal intersection between the supernatural heavens (which we know of now merely
as places in outer space) and the fallen world of Earth. Christianity thus
follows the patterns of deification and mythologization that are familiar not
just to all historians, but to anyone who’s coped with the loss of a loved one
by confabulating and concluding that the dearly departed was the greatest
father, mother, husband or wife for whom anyone could have asked. When dealing
with a horrific experience, we often enter tunnel vision; far from soberly
accepting the statistical fact that none of us has everlasting significance, we
glorify those in whom we’ve been emotionally invested, to avoid the awkwardness
of having wasted our feelings on something so transient and ultimately
inconsequential as another human life.

The Axial Age

Much of the historical context of Christianity was
deliberately destroyed by the established churches. Those who rejected the
party-line myths or whose deviant form of worship pointed to a larger earthly
milieu were demonized and persecuted, their texts burned and their movements
wiped out. Then the Church lost its autocratic power as a result of the Age of
Reason which began with the Renaissance. And now we’re poised to see, indeed,
that the contemporary enlightenment in Europe from the 14th to the
17th centuries CE wasn’t the first of its kind. It was indeed a re-birth, as indicated by the word “Renaissance,”
which means Revival. The most illuminating part of the historical context of
Christianity is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Period. As
he writes in The Origin and Goal of
History, that was the uncanny “period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual
process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with
the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into
being.”

More specifically,

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this
period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese
philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and
a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran
the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to
materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging
view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the
prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah and
Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the
philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and
Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few
centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one
of these regions knowing of the others.

Jaspers describes what is new about this age in existential
terms: “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and of his
limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness.
He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation
and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the
highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the
lucidity of transcendence.” The cause of these revolutions, says Jaspers, was
“reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking
became its own object.”

So this ancient period of enlightenment was both spiritual
and philosophical, and a word that encompasses both aspects is “existential.” We
might compare, then, the two historical awakenings, the ancient Axial Age and
the modern one, by noting that the latter leaves less room for spiritual,
psychological or social growth, because its catalysts were advances mainly in technoscience,
in an instrumental affair that only presupposes rather than justifies certain
ideals. After the medieval Dark Age, reason was wedded not to the
self-awareness of Byronic loners but to industrialists. (Romanticism was a movement
of counter-Enlightenment in the early 1800s.) Instead of a mass flowering of
spiritual insight, Europe and the Americas devised new forms of population
control that were made possible by developments in economics and public
relations. Instead of efficacious modern religions we had “ideologies” such as
the Nazi or Communist utopias and the American Dream of Liberty.

That, though, makes for a larger point of similarity between
the two periods of existential enlightenment. As Jaspers wrote,

The age that saw all these developments, which spanned
several centuries, cannot be regarded as a simple upward movement. It was an
age of simultaneous destruction and creation. No final consummation was
attained. The highest potentialities of thought and practical expression realized
in individuals did not become common property, because the majority of men were
unable to follow in their footsteps. What began as freedom of motion finally
became anarchy. When the age lost its creativeness, a process of dogmatic
fixation and leveling-down took place in all three cultural realms. Out of a
disorder that was growing intolerable arose a striving after new ties, through
the re-establishment of enduring conditions.

Thus arose empires of conquest in China (Tsin Shu hwang-ti),
India (Maurya dynasty), and the West (Hellenistic and Roman empires).
“Everywhere the first outcome of the collapse was an order of technological and
organizational planning.”

That which had collapsed as a result of rational
enlightenment was the “Mythical Age, with its tranquility and self-evidence.” What
the Frankforts call the mythopoeic naiveté of childhood innocence was
suspended by the Axial Age of Doubt. Those prehistoric, that is, prehumanistic
and regressive myths had codified prejudices and superstitions that had held
together tribes and kingdoms since the end of the Paleolithic Era. Once the
conventions were questioned, because of the dawning of hyperconsciousness, the multitudes
could no longer take their existentially inauthentic modes of life for granted.
At least, they had to defer to the newfangled spiritual and philosophical elites
whose knowledge and experience were subversive and might have led to mass panic
if the majority had had firsthand access to them. The Axial Age liberation was thus
relatively short-lived, but there was a long-delayed aftershock after the Dark
Age: the Rebirth of Reason, beginning in the 14th C. And arguably,
the creative spirit of that latter age has likewise left us in the last century,
and we “postmodern” or “post-postmodern” relativists and cynics now absurdly
wait for Godot, knowing that no mythical narrative can sooth us.

In any case, my concern here isn’t with this comparison or
even with the strangeness of the Axial Age’s synchronicities. Instead, my point is that Christianity can
and should be understood in light of the Axial Age. There were, in fact,
three indisputable lines of influence from the Age in question: the Jewish
prophets, whom the early Christians read in the Septuagint; Greek philosophy
which had spread to Galilee, for example, having been recycled by the Roman
Republic which had conquered that region in 63 BCE; and Persian (Zoroastrian)
and Indian religions, which had also spread to multicultural Rome and thus to Judea
due to Alexander the Great’s conquests. Those conquests led, for example, to a
spiritual reinforcement of the Greco-Roman Mystery Religions, which had already
paralleled Indo-Iranian religions as a result of their likely common origin in
a Proto-Indo-European culture.

(On this latter point of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, see Samuel
Angus’s The Mystery Religions: “Alexander
translated into reality what Greek philosophy had fitfully advocated. He first
broke down national barriers and set the nations free for international relationships.”
That cosmopolitanism “reached its apogee in the Roman Empire” and was
accomplished “by Alexander’s deliberate policy of intermixing diverse
populations; his studied fair treatment of all peoples under his sovereignty;
the commercial activity which was stimulated by opening up new fields of
enterprise and by putting millions of hoarded Persian bullion into circulation;
by religious tolerance; and in a conspicuous manner by providing the first
universal tongue for the whole civilized world in the Greek Koine” (16-17). For example, in the
second century BCE,

The Great Mother won her way to popular favor immediately
[in Rome] and her worship whetted the appetite of the Romans for emotional
cults. Rome’s interface in the affairs of the East, more energetic after the
defeat of Carthage, brought her armies and merchants and officials increasingly
into contact with that [“orgiastic and enervating”] type of religion of which
the Great Mother was the first example. The thousands of Orientals who traveled
westward brought their mystery-gods with them. The multitudes of slaves from
the East not only formed private religious associations, but became
propagandists to their Roman masters (35).

And the appetite was there in the Roman Empire because
Rome’s state religion “was cold and formal and, from the Second Punic War, had
become an instrument of government in the hands of the nobility. Those
entrusted with its administration, while recognizing its social value, no
longer believed in it. Its observation was very perfunctory; its ceremonies
were often neglected” (33). Luckily, thanks to the Axial Age awakening, there
was a surplus of spiritual energy in the East.)

The Wisdom Hidden in Christianity

Where is Axial Age enlightenment to be found in
Christianity? Esoterically, that is, covertly and with much official opposition,
in various respects: from Judaism, the earliest Christians would have absorbed
the many tales of the prophets’ zealous adherence to morality, where “morality”
would have meant obedience to God’s commandments. Interestingly, according to
Wikipedia, the Hebrew word for “prophet,” navi, derives from a root word that means “hollowness or openness;
to receive transcendental wisdom, one must make oneself ‘open.’” Hollowness in
this case entails, first of all, renunciation of worldly things, an ascetic withdrawal from natural and
common social life, such as occurred in the Essenes’ community. But hollowness
would have entailed also a highly cerebral frame of mind, a philosophical
obsession with self-analysis, abstract thoughts, and the objective, impersonal
view from nowhere that facilitates what would have felt like possession by a
muse (or by an “angel of God”) that guides the intellectual’s ecstatic contemplations.
A modern paradigm here is Descartes’ simulated renunciation by way of doubts
about everything from mathematics to the existence of an external world. But
the ancient world was full of wandering, homeless seers who had no possessions
and who thus tried to save themselves from madness by occupying their mind with
elevated pursuits. Thus, the character Jesus is depicted as a prophet in the
Mosaic mold. His Sermon on the Mount resembles Moses’s issuing of the Ten
Commandments, and as the Jewish prophets condemned disbelievers on behalf of
God, warning that God would destroy them, Jesus preached that those who
rejected his message would be punished in hell.

Fundamentally,
though, the Axial Age influence via Judaism is apparent in the radicalism of Jesus’s message. Like
the other Jewish prophets’ ravings, Jesus’s subversive socialism, pacifism,
altruism, and single-minded devotion to an unnatural deity are unworkable in
daily life, because Christianity is based on the spiritual elites’ distaste for
natural processes in general, which they considered profane, fallen, or
illusory, and the masses are natural creatures, unfit for existential
transformation, for an emptying of the soul of all worldly attachments. By
contrast, the biblical Jesus wandered the desert and was tempted by Satan, but
held fast to his otherworldly ideal. This refusal to compromise with the ways
of lesser reality, such as with the conventions of Pharisaic Judaism which
Jesus used as so many foils against his purer interpretation of God’s will, is
an unmistakable sign that the essence if not always the details of the mythical
narrative of Jesus’s life derives from tales of the exemplary prophets and
ascetics from the Old Testament as well as perhaps from the mind-altering
Upanishads and from lore of the Buddha and of Zoroaster.

Then there’s the Greek influence via Saint Paul. Alexandrian cosmopolitanism is alive and
well in Paul’s teaching that Jesus was a Jewish prophet whose message was
nevertheless for all gentiles, and that the latter needn’t obey Jewish customs
to be Christian. Judaism was parochial whereas Jesus’s message was universal. Zoroastrian dualism is likewise apparent
in Paul’s Gnosticism, which was covered up by the founders of Catholicism, and
in Marcion’s cosmic dualism which so captured the spirit of early Christianity
that his church rivaled Catholicism for centuries. Rather like the ancient
Greeks, Zoroaster taught that what we perceive as reality is a stage in a
titanic struggle between forces of absolute good and evil. (In Greek mythology,
Zeus and his allies battle Cronos and the Titans, so that justice and harmony
would triumph over disorder.) Our great purpose is to participate in this
struggle and to side with the supreme god Ahura Mazda who will triumph over the
evil Angra Mainyu at the end of time. The biblical book of Revelation carries
over Zoroastrian apocalypticism, and
Christianity’s demonizing of the Jewish figure of Satan—who by tempting us was
originally just doing his job as a skeptic—meant that Christians had adopted
Zoroaster’s absolute morality and
dualism.

Marcion taught that Yahweh, the supreme god of Judaism, is
obviously not Jesus’s god, since the Jewish scriptures depict Yahweh as a
jealous and vengeful tyrant whereas Jesus’s heavenly father is a fount of grace
and forgiveness. From the modern historical perspective, we can appreciate that
the reason for this discrepancy is that, far from issuing straight from the
mouth of God, the Jewish scriptures were redacted by bitter priestly editors,
among others, who read their fanatical moralism into their legends so that they could retroactively condemn the Canaanites’ polytheism and profligacy.
In any case, Marcion’s emphasis on the true
god’s alienness, which is to say on his unnaturalness, and thus the radical
mysticism inherent in the Axial Age revelations are implicit in the celebrated incoherence
of the official Christian conception of God as being both just and merciful,
and of the triune model of the Godhead in which Jesus, the Father, and the Holy
Spirit are all the same but different. Gnostic
fatalism persists in the non-Jewish Christian notion that while we
should long to be saved from the fallen plane of nature, we can do nothing to extricate
ourselves, because the natural world is metaphysically, existentially a prison;
only grace from beyond can free us from our fate of everlasting torment.

Most importantly, though,
the core Christian idea that Jesus was a dying and rising god-man who saves us
when we identify with him derives from the older realization that there is no
god higher than any instance of fully-awakened self-consciousness; the true god
lies within. In the Upanishads, God alone is ultimately real, but God
amuses itself by pretending to be a plurality of creatures and material
objects. Enlightened individuals purify their awareness so that they can
perceive those pluralities as being illusory, whereupon they identify not with
their ego or their material possessions but with Atman, their essential self
whom they now realize is identical with the Supreme Being Brahman. Through
gnosis, the knowledge that saves from the cycle of reincarnation, Brahman
awakens to its identity and so the apparent man or woman turns out to be the
same as the ultimate power in the universe. The
deity comes to the mortal individual who then is united with that deity. Although
there are no anthropomorphic gods in this system, in Daoism, too, the
individual is united with supreme reality, with the Dao or the way of the
universe, by wu wei, by effortless,
spontaneous action as opposed to the selfish kind brought about by the
self-defeating illusion that a mere mortal can resist the forces of nature.
Like the Star Wars Jedi, the Daoist sage lets the Force flow through him;
again, the supreme power comes to the lost, deluded individual who dies to her
lower, ephemeral self to become one with that power.

The Mystery Religions also taught that each person can
become immortal like God, that we can thereby be saved from the prison of phony
reality. The Mysteries were secret rituals designed to deliver a mystical
experience of oneness with a deity. In 3.2 of The Mystery Religions, Angus shows that “common to all the Mysteries
was the faith in communion, or identification with God.” This was achieved in
various ways, such as through ecstasy
or enthusiasm brought about by vigil,
fasting, whirling dances, or hallucination. “In ecstasy the devotee was lifted
above the level of his ordinary experience into an abnormal consciousness of an
exhilarating condition in which the body ceased to be a hindrance to the soul.”
And “Enthusiasm was the immediate ‘inspiration,’ or replenishing of the
personality by the deity”; that is, the individual was “possessed” by God, by
way of some mental derangement, so that the individual’s personality subsided,
allowing the initiate to speak for the deity in revelations from prophetic
dreams and visions. Instead of merely deferring to maniacs, however, “the great
mystics made ethical considerations a prerequisite condition for a true
enjoyment of these religious privileges.” As did the Zoroastrians, the
Mysteries maintained that the mystical experience has a moral dimension; the
point was that hyperconsciousness leads to wisdom and to progress in life.

Besides those two forms of divine union, there was deification or apotheosis, the initiate’s literal transformation into a deity. For
example, according to Angus, there was “the God-Man conception, which, rising in
the East, and advancing from vague intuitions and impalpable premonitions, and
assuming diverse forms, modified all ancient pagan and even Christian
theology.” The Mysteries conceived of deification in three interrelated ways:
“mystic identification with the tutelary [divine guardian],” “endowment with
deathlessness and transformation into the divine substance,” and “the divine
indwelling, by which the material man became spiritual.” As Angus points out, the
second form is apparent in the sacramental
meal (the Eucharist), which Christians took over from the Mysteries, while the
third form “was so conspicuous in the mystical aspects of Paulinism, and still
more in the thought of the Fourth Gospel.”

This is why Saint Paul frequently speaks of being “in Christ”
or “in the Spirit” and of “Christ in you,” and why the Gospel of John has Jesus
speak of “the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither
sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in
you.” Indeed, in John Jesus exhausts the many possible ways of characterizing a
close relationship to God. For example, he declares, “Whoever believes in me
does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. The one who looks at me
is seeing the one who sent me” (12:44-45), “For I did not speak on my own, but
the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken” (12:49), and
so on and so forth. Likewise, the mystical version of Christian eschatology,
according to which people won’t be able to say “‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’
because the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), hints at a more general
presence of God. And just compare those sayings with the Discourses of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who lived from
55-135 CE in Rome and Greece: “You are bearing a God with you though you know
it not. Do you think I mean some external god of silver of gold? It is within
yourself you carry him, and you do not perceive that it is he whom you profane
by impure thoughts and unworthy actions. If even an image of God were present
you would not dare to act as you do, but when God himself is within you,
hearing and seeing all, are you not ashamed of such conduct and thoughts,
ignorant of your own nature?” (II.8).

Angus shows also that in addition to the notion of the
devotee’s “marriage” to God, an image
found also in the New Testament’s talk of the Church as the bride of Christ,
the Mysteries often counted on the union happening through “sympathy” with the deity.

In the sacrament the communicant witnessed and participated
in the sorrows of his tutelary as a step to participation in the triumphant
issues [i.e. in immortality]. The Oriental gods were not passionless and joyous
abstractions of personifications: they were beings who suffered and rejoiced,
struggled and conquered, died and rose again, and in these respects came nearer
to the experiences of man. This fellowship in the deity’s sorrows as a means of
ensuring the deity’s fellowship in man’s sorrows and of attaining apotheosis
was a comparatively new idea in the West, which, once introduced, gained a
powerful hold on the imagination.

Angus is talking here of “the idea that the repetition of
the deity’s passion must precede fellowship in his resurrection.” For example,
“In the Greek rites of Eleusis the devotee contemplated and entered into the
trials of Demeter in her sorrowful quest for the lost Persephone.”

Plainly, at the very least, the Christian story of Jesus’
death and resurrection could have evoked the same sort of sympathy in the
Christian devotee. Hear Paul in Gal. 2:20 declare, “I have been crucified with
Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the
body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Faith somehow puts Paul on the cross
with Jesus! Indeed, Christian “faith” in
Christ is little more than such sympathy or fellow-feeling for Christ’s
depicted miseries. For Paul, who said Christians are justified before God regardless
of whether they obey the Jewish Law (Rom. 3:28), “all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the
redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a
propitiation by His blood through faith”
(Rom. 3:23-25, my emphasis). Notice the incongruity of specifying in this
theological formula how the details of a certain act of human sacrifice rectify
our sins, and then of adding that all those details—the grace, the gift, the
public humiliation, the redemption, the propitiation, the spilling of holy
blood—must be channeled to the Christian “through faith.” Apparently, Jesus’s
death itself wasn’t enough to save anyone from the fallen realm. Without faith,
or confidence in the power of Jesus’s death plus the expected groveling and
thanksgiving to God so frequently displayed by Christians from time immemorial,
Jesus’s death and resurrection would presumably have been inconsequential,
according to Paul. The Christian must believein the god-man to be saved by Christ
and made immortal in a “spiritual body” after resurrection—just as the Eleusinian
initiate had to suffer along with Demeter in Hades to ascend with her, or as the
follower of Orphism had to suffer with Zagreus to be reborn with him, or as the
Roman soldier had to be awed by the strength of Mithra and to ritually reenact
his struggle to ascend with him to the heavens.

Mel Gibson’s torture-porn version of the gospel, The Passion
of the Christ, is premised on the American Christian’s capacity to sympathize
with the travails of her imagined god-man. This is why Gibson strived for
realism by having the characters speak in Aramaic or Latin, and why he
emphasized or exaggerated the Roman soldiers’ torture of Jesus and the violence
of crucifixion: he shrewdly understood that postmodern Christians are hungry
for a spiritual experience even though their religion is decrepit, and he
provided the stimuli for that catharsis. Christians could be awed by Jesus’s
sacrifice for humanity, because by seeing a graphic presentation instead of
merely listening to the same tired words uttered in church, they could feel
both sorry and thankful for Jesus’s suffering and thus be all the more
confident in their salvation. The movie functioned like a work of virtual
reality, bringing the god-man to the initiate—only, because the Christians in
question were postmodern Americans, not enlightened elites from the Axial Age, the
existential lesson was altogether lost on them, the “spiritual” experience
being more like a spectacle consumed for momentary, salacious entertainment.

The upshot is that
Christianity bears the marks of the Axial Age’s spiritual and philosophical
insights. This isn’t to say merely that universal, perennial wisdom can be
discerned in Christian theology, with the aid of hermeneutic tricks or
projections. The elements of Christianity themselves are clearly descended from
the advent of hyperconsciousness that occurred around the world some centuries
before Jesus is said to have lived. Again, what had happened was that
philosophical inquiries and a heightened form of self-awareness replaced blind
obedience to elders and traditions, at least for the intellectual elites.
Instead of allegories and superstitions that were so many instruments in the
class war between the wealthy and the poor, as in the stagnant Roman state pantheon,
religious texts became records of existential exploration, metaphysical
investigations proceeding from an authentic commitment to rationally-obtained knowledge.
Instead of tolerating dogmas that upheld unjust societal power structures,
intellectuals asked profound philosophical questions and wrestled with the
possibilities. In their moments of intensive self-awareness, they discovered that
purified human nature is perfectly divine. Immortality isn’t granted merely to
the high-born by the fiat of inscrutable deities; the universal God of the
Philosophers replaced all petty tribal gods, and everyone could know God merely
by knowing themselves. Detachment from the profane world was needed to purify
the mind, to prepare for the existential reckoning, and the result was
ambivalence towards outer nature as the spiritual revolutionary became absorbed
with the inner world. The metaphor of
the dying and rising god-man, inherited from agricultural myths that celebrated
the cycle of the seasons, took on existential importance as the spiritual
elites realized that, owing to our capacity for unlimited self-awareness, human
nature is especially divine, so that our
cycle of abandoning our deluded egos and rising to existential authenticity
deserves our full attention. In short, the Axial Age was driven by an ancient humanism, and Christianity is
essentially a version of that universal wisdom. Indeed, as Jaspers suggested,
the existential, psychological aspects of Axial Age insights account for the
similarities of the pre-Christian revolutions, if not for their timing.

Christian Suppression of Axial Age Wisdom

Paradoxically,
however, the essence of Christianity has been irrelevant to most Christians.Christianity as we currently know it is
distinguished not by its wisdom but by its official cover-up of perennial wisdom.
Far from carrying on the tradition of Axial Age humanism, the Catholic Church
sought to contain the existential insights, to hide them in plain sight. To
begin with the more widely known examples, the Church persecuted Gnostics as heretics.
Marcion was the first “heresiarch” and was opposed by Tertullian and excommunicated.
The Gnostic Pauline epistles were interpolated (e.g. 1 Thess. 2:14-16 and 1
Cor. 14:34-35; the anti-Judaism runs against Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and
the misogyny against Gnostic feminism) and supplemented with official forgeries
(2 Thess., 1 and 2 Tim., Titus, and likely Colossians and Ephesians) to soften
the Gnostic message. The pagan religions that were more open to the Axial Age
revolutions were eventually outlawed by the Roman Church and destroyed in the
practice of Christianization, that is, of forced conversion to Christianity. This
happened especially under Emperor Theodosius I, spurred by Saint Ambrose,
Bishop of Milan, and later under Theodosius II. The sacred sites of the Mystery
Religions were desecrated and destroyed in 396 CE by Arian Christians when they sacked Rome. Then there’s the structural effect of the
Catholic hierarchy, which not only separated the laity from their god but that
insulated the Church leaders from the laity, allowing its priests and bishops
to abuse their power after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its
official religion. These flaws led to the Protestant Reformation, although
Protestant individualism still doesn’t capture the Axial Age insights, as I’ll
show in a moment.

The principal part of
the cover-up, though, is Christian literalism. The heart of theistic
humanism is that all people are divine, that God is fully within each of us.
Christianity separates God from humanity by reinterpreting the very metaphor of
the Christian god-man that’s supposed to illustrate how we can each be born
anew in a higher state of consciousness. Instead of assuming that Jesus was a
ghostly, visionary figure, as the Docetists believed, catholic Christians
maintained that Jesus was a particular man who lived during a certain number of
decades in Judea, Galilee, and Jerusalem. Instead
of treating Christ as a heavenly figure like the other divine heroes, Jesus is historically situated and thus isolated from the vast majority of his followers. The
more time would pass since the alleged historical life of Jesus, the more
irrelevant Jesus would become to the daily experience of Christians.

The Church addressed this and attempted to accommodate the earthly
need for religious experience, by positing that Jesus was resurrected after
death, whereupon he inhabited a magical body that wasn’t bound by space or time.
However, no sooner had Jesus been reborn and therefore capable of appearing
before Christians at any point in history, but the New Testament declares that
the risen Jesus ascended to his heavenly station at his Father’s right hand
side (as in the false ending of Mark) and will return only in the End Time when
the kingdom of heaven will wash away the corrupt world, as in the Book of
Revelation. Why, you may ask, does Luke end by saying, “When he [Jesus] had led
them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them
and was taken up into heaven” (24:50-51, my emphasis)? Why couldn’t the risen
Christ remain longer on Earth? Indeed, couldn’t he have blessed everyone on the
planet with a personal appearance? Did he have to leave right in the middle of
his blessing, as if to diminish the value of religious experience? The
interpolator of Mark may imagine that the reason was that the Father needed
Christ to be the power that enforces his will throughout Creation, that being
the significance of the “place of honour at God’s right hand.” This would be
nonsensical, of course, because Heaven would be eternal, so the Father wouldn’t
have been waiting impatiently for Christ to return to him. The more obvious
reason is political: as Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels, the
trouble with a risen Christ figure is that he could undermine the authority of
everything the Church does in his name. No sooner might the Church issue a
law than someone in the countryside could report bearing witness to a criticism
voiced by none other than the risen body of Jesus. That spiritual anarchy would have been intolerable to an earthly
religious institution, and so the Church had to historicize and contain the
risen Christ just as it contained the life and death of the god-man Jesus.

The temporalized risen Christ wouldn’t have satisfied the
laity as the generations passed, and so the Catholic Church, that is, the most
ambitious church in secular terms invented the Holy Spirit as the third person
of the trinity of gods. According to Acts, the Spirit came upon the apostles,
clarifying their understanding of Jesus’s mission and allowing them to
accomplish miracles. Once again, the humanistic, egalitarian implications of
the Spirit abiding in each faithful Christian would have been counterproductive
for the purpose of sustaining an earthly institution. So the Catholic
Catechism, for example, is careful to contain the Gnostic, humanistic implications,
with this Jesuitical qualification: “Because we are dead or at least wounded
through sin, the first effect of the gift of love [through the Holy Spirit] is
the forgiveness of our sins. The communion of the Holy Spirit in the Church restores to the baptized
the divine likeness lost through sin” (734, my emphasis). How does this work?
With the ungainly metaphor of the Church as Christ’s body, with the risen Jesus
himself as the head of this body and the Holy Spirit as its animating force and
personality. Thus the Church can get away with conceding that “The Spirit
manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls his word to them and opens their
minds to the understanding of his Death and Resurrection”, because the Church
insists in the same paragraph that “The mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit
is brought to completion in the Church,
which is the Body of Christ and the
Temple of the Holy Spirit” (737, my emphasis). Thus, the full, ponderous metaphor:
“Because the Holy Spirit is the anointing of Christ, it is Christ who, as the
head of the Body, pours out the Spirit among his members to nourish, heal, and
organize them in their mutual functions, to give them life, send them to bear
witness, and associate them to his self-offering to the Father and to his
intercession for the whole world. Through the Church's sacraments, Christ
communicates his Holy and sanctifying Spirit to the members of his Body” (739).
In short, “The Church is, in a phrase used by the Fathers, the place ‘where the
Spirit flourishes’” (749). Spiritual
anarchy and humanism are thereby forestalled, because the Spirit’s
manifestations must be processed by the Church hierarchy.

The grotesque image
of Christians as members of the body of Christ that’s animated by the Holy
Spirit functions not as a way of empowering Christians to be fully divine
themselves, but as another scheme for degrading them. Instead of being
divine in their rational autonomy and capacity for hyperconsciousness,
Christians are compared to cells in an organic body, imprisoned once again but
this time in that which is alleged to be the body of the risen Lord—even though
that “body” is obviously just an institution made up of human members who
devise rules and regulations in buildings they themselves erect, and even
though the “risen head” of this body is obviously nowhere to be found. Like a cell that can only perform its
evolved function or be rejected by the rest of the body as dysfunctional, a
Christian can bear only the “fruits” deemed acceptable to the Church hierarchy
or be driven out as a heretic. Infamously, the early fruits of modern
science were judged anti-Christian and so were condemned. Christian humanists
were excommunicated or burned at the stake. And those Christians who passed
muster lacked precisely the qualities that make for divinity: rational
autonomy, the freedom to learn the truth, to empower yourself and thus to
overcome the truth if it offends, by creating a new truth. Whereas a Catholic
is supposed to be saved by her involvement in this bureaucratic rigmarole,
she’s missed the point. Reduced to a cell in a body politic, she serves
double-dealing earthly masters such as the priests who around the world
literally and systematically prey on the young and who are sufficiently
educated to understand the esoteric doctrines they’re tasked with suppressing. Those who are potentially human gods,
according to Axial Age wisdom, are turned into functional servants, locked into
the very body that was supposed to have taught them how to be divine, by the
examples of self-awareness, altruism, and asceticism displayed by its
incarnation in the life and death of Jesus! The irony with which the
instrument of salvation has become one of doom is staggering. The Catholic Church isn’t a beacon
of spiritual revelation so much as a methodical withholding of perennial
humanism and a brazen conspiracy against the fulfillment of our potential.

The main doctrinal difference between the western and eastern
churches offers a tantalizing clue in this context. Catholic theology is arid
and scholastic, emphasizing the philosophical aspect of its Axial Age heritage,
while the Eastern Orthodox Church prizes “theoria,” which is contemplative
prayer for the sake of achieving an epiphany (theosis), an experience of God.
Notice the similarities between this element of Eastern Orthodox theology and
the Mystery Religions, for example, as indicated by this summary: “In Eastern Orthodoxy deification (theosis) is a
transformative process whose goal is likeness to or union with God. As a
process of transformation, theosis is brought about by the effects of katharsis
(purification of mind and body) and theoria (‘illumination’ with the ‘vision’
of God).” Still, both churches suppress the humanistic thrust of Axial Age
enlightenment. The Eastern Church misinterprets the experience of unity with
God as one of joining with a preexistent deity. For example, while Saint
Athanasius says, in On the Incarnation of
the Word, “He [God] was incarnate [in Jesus] that we might be made god”
(54.3), he takes this to be a process in which Christ paves the way for our
deification, whereas the Jesus narrative must be only metaphorical if we can perceive
ourselves to be fully divine. “Union
with God” is a theistic euphemism for the atheistic revelation that we’re identical to gods, that any creature
capable of self-awareness and thus of understanding and re-engineering
everything under the sun is as actually divine as any being could be in
approximation to the palpably fictitious gods from our religious myths.

As for Protestantism, the reformers shook off the corrupt Catholic
hierarchy, but not the Christian canon which was formed by the founders of that
very church in opposition to the more individualistic Gnostics. Indeed,
Protestants idolize the Bible and fail to appreciate that if humans wrote those
texts, contrary to the pitifully deficient demonstrations of inerrantists, and those
texts are spiritually magnificent as the Protestants believe, we must be all
the more divine. Protestants could have added to the Christian canon,
incorporating Gnostic or other “heretical” myths, but they hewed close to the
dictates of their captors like victims of Stockholm syndrome, merely tidying up
the Catholic canon, eliminating the deuterocanonical works. Moreover,
Protestant individualism is a compromise with nonspiritual, secular agendas.
Protestants are supposed to think for themselves instead of relying on a
paternalistic institution, and this self-reliance fits all-too well with the
social Darwinian fear that it’s every man and woman for themselves, that
society is powered by a market in which competitors struggle for domination.
Instead of busying themselves with existential self-exploration, Protestants
developed passive-aggressive excuses for self-destructive business practices.
While mouthing “All glory to God!” the Protestant relishes the chance to
compete in the godless economy to show her worthiness of being saved, to a
deity that, for some reason, is supposed to be impressed by anyone’s earthly
success. This absurdity reaches its nadir in the “prosperity gospel” of
American hucksters like Joel Osteen, by which point Protestantism shades off
into a parasitic self-help philosophy for duped consumers.

Riddles Wrapped in an Enigma

At least two questions remain. First, if the early
power-hungry “Christians” were bent on suppressing Axial Age insights, why did
they leave any trace of them in their religion? Why didn’t they put together a
rival theology that had nothing do with our deification? The answer is that the
Axial Age insights were no mere lines written here or there that could be so
easily bypassed. We’re speaking here of the ancient birth of philosophy and of humanistic
religion that shook the foundations of the social orders. Moreover, all
spiritual energy at the time depended on the works of those Axial Age prophets and
ascetics. In a world in which entertainments were scarce, improvements of myths
were treasured. With no television to show the passive multitudes their myths
in tangible form, the ancients had to rely on their imagination and on
ceremonies that had to pay off in some rapturous revelation to compensate for
the superficial silliness of such low-tech means of pursuing their life’s
purpose. Thus, were the founders of Christianity to have ignored the Axial Age,
their theology would have had precisely no mojo and the Church would have
lacked staying power. The Catholic
Church’s fiendish genius was in suppressing the subversive insights into the nature
of our existential authenticity, by hiding them in plain sight.

Second, am I endorsing the religions that honoured rather
than hid their Axial Age origins or developments, such as Hinduism or Buddhism?
Not really. Although the Eastern religions generally are closer to the Axial
Age than are the Western ones, I side with Jaspers in concluding that the Axial
Age centered around a revolution in self-awareness and that, compared to
theistic religions, humanistic philosophy, especially the “existential” kind
that deals forthrightly with the glory and the agony of free creatures, is the
more direct means of informing us about that revolution. This is so precisely
because the latter are liable to be bastardized in the literalistic
misinterpretations, as happened not just in the case of Christianity but in the
exoteric forms of all the major religions, including the Eastern ones. In fact,
I know of no adequate conception of our place in the universe. Modern
existentialists such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Jaspers provide
pieces of the puzzle that had been lost to the mainstream religions, but no one
fully understands what sort of world would include creatures that can transcend
it. We stand as anomalies within an anomaly, and so no one but the most revered
and otherworldly interlopers can have seen us for what we truly are.

14 comments:

Your 2nd to last paragraph really does sum up the central historical question to me..The empowering, (re)created myth of conscious rebirth isn't any harder to see than any other comparative religion. I think Joseph Campbell talks a lot about this in a popular way, I haven't read Jaspers, but JC seems like he did. He focuses on the optimistic, self-help strain (he doesn't highlight the horror that his teacher Jung did, he isn't as mystic or atavistic). Even he had a special distaste for how that always plays out in Christian literalism, though you could say that's something that all Western thinkers have to contend with culturally.

I also like how you highlight the irony of the Protestant path, it leads to a multitude, a church for every interpretation and mystical experience, and yet it tears out the gnostic insight of rebellion (much like Islam). Along with any sense of the feminine (much like Islam). The Catholics and their predatory male priests ironically offer a more gendered trap.

"..we glorify those in whom we’ve been emotionally invested, to avoid the awkwardness of having wasted our feelings on something so transient and ultimately inconsequential as another human life." What are those feelings for if not to be tragically wasted trying to join with another human being, impossibly? There are certain existential insights that only bear tragic fruit with the Other, just as a life is somehow aesthetically unappealing without realizing just how alone you are. Still, we live with those feelings..we may be enacting genetic imperatives to spread our genes, helpless robots in an evolutionary sense, but it seems like trading one description for another. I find your take on love or relationship least satisfying, but not because I disagree with the ultimate conclusion. Not sure, still thinking about this.

Glad to see a new essay, this is a naive gut reaction, I look forward to thinking about it more.

Yeah, Joseph Campbell was a leader in comparative mythology. Jung was into Gnosticism, so naturally Campbell and Jung would criticize Christianity for making Gnosticism heretical. My point in this article is that this fits into the larger picture of Christianity's relation to the Axial Age.

See my later replies to the comments on this article for more on my views of sex and love, but here I'll just say that I don't think it's a semantic matter of trading descriptions; it's not an arbitrary question of labels. The attitudes going into our behaviour and the question of personal integrity are paramount for me.

I think you see that I wasn't saying in that quoted sentence that we shouldn't have sexual feelings. There are degrees of asceticism, and we should do the best we can in that regard, depending on the extent of our vision of that which most opposes us (i.e. the impersonality of Being which will be responsible for our eventual bitter end as a species).

I'm saying that deep down we know those feelings of romantic attraction and intimacy are absurd (selfish, childish, foolish, animalistic, hypocritical), and so we overcompensate by glorifying our loved ones after they die and can no longer give the lie to our exaggerations. We do that to convince ourselves that our feelings were merited rather than typically delusional or brought about by impersonal natural forces.

The problem isn't with sex or love themselves so much as whether they prevent us from keeping the big, existential picture in the back of our mind at least. Without that worthy philosophical/religious perspective, there's no chance that our societies will progress to keep up with our technoscientific empowerment. Our behaviour will still be very embarrassingly short-sighted and subhuman, and that will be ever more dangerous the more we acquire godlike power.

I just have to say that I agree with guthrie about the piece about personal relationships. I have paid close attention to this blog over the past couple of years. It's some of the thought that I relate back to most, and I've taken many of the insights to heart. Yet, I think there are a few things that aren't as obvious as Ben believes they are. For example, forgoing relationships with others as part of the ascetic urge doesn't seem like it's inherently part of the existential rebellion. Rather than go into this, I think there's plenty about the existential rebellion that he becomes a bit to prescriptive on. The second we say that human beings must take charge of their own artificial, aesthetic creation, it becomes very difficult to say that what they're doing is less authentic. Is it the fact that somebody could have a sexual relationship that is inauthentic? I rather think the reasons somebody engages in a relationship determine its authenticity. I don't think sex has to be horrifying.

But this gets to my main point. Yes, there is horror in the existential predicament, but I fundamentally disagree that it is the only response. Plenty of mystics display awe, not horror in the face of their deity, the cosmos. And given that Ben freely admits the aesthetic dimension to be foundational in these issues, I don't get how he can say that somebody who, knowing all the facts, but doesn't react with horror, is wrong. If someobody doesn't display horror for all the same facts you do, why is your aesthetic feeling about the existential predicament necessarily more correct? Why can't it be a mixture of awe, horror, aversion, ego-annihilation, wonder? It seems a bit silly to say, "you must be afraid! and you're just too stupid if you're not afraid!" It seems frankly a bit naive.

Thanks for your thoughts on these important question, Matthew. I should clarify that I haven't exactly said we should forgo all relationships. I've said we should strive to be creative in all our endeavours, to transcend the monstrous impersonality of nature. That is, we should create ourselves to become people in the fullest sense instead of succumbing so much to the base urges we have in common with the animals that have less chance for autonomy.

Perfect asceticism is somewhat paradoxical. To continue the rebellion against the deepest source of all misery, the ascetic has to submit to nature, by going along with her body at least with regard to breathing and eating. In any case, ascetic withdrawal will ultimately count for nothing, in that nature will have the last word when our kind fades out of being. Our redemption is aesthetic, not consequential. We likely won't change the world or become full-fledged gods, but we can withdraw from the more egregiously embarrassing and degrading natural functions, and when we plunge our precious mentality into the absurd world of impersonal processes, willingly objectifying ourselves and others for whatever reason, we can at least have the decency to keep in mental reserve some sense of the wider tragedy that thereby plays out. I'm aware that thoughts of existential philosophy would be a major buzzkill when we enter party mode or are in the middle of a sex act. And I certainly don't have all the answers about how we can be at our existential best. But I'm laying out the conflicts as I see them.

As to whether we can have a sexual relationship while still being authentic or existentially responsible, that's an excellent question which I'll have to take up in article form. In fact, that will likely be my next one.

I may have been leaning too hard on the point of horror in nature. I haven't meant to say that nature isn't likewise awe-inspiring. In fact, something can be so monstrous as to be sublime, in which case it surpasses our comprehension and we're left with awe as our last resort. Terror would be too practical in that we'd still understand that we're in danger. Awe would be a fittingly useless response to that which short-circuits our brain.

As Guthrie points out, I don't speak of being "wrong" or "incorrect" in this context. When we fail to inspire in aesthetic terms, it's only a bummer. It's like when you pass by a substandard piece of art in the gallery or on the street. You don't go out of your way to condemn the artist; no, you merely walk by and hope for something better down the line. We're not doing math here. There's no airtight proof that a way of life is entirely out of touch with reality. If it exists, it's real. Animal behaviour is real, so in that sense it's "correct" or true, which is to say only that it happens and may even be normal (prevalent). I'm saying (with many philosophical and religious traditions) that we degrade ourselves when we act as animals.

If someone doesn't perceive the world as horrific, I'd want to know why. Turning from behaviour to beliefs, we can speak of objective truth or delusion by checking whether the beliefs are naturalistic or, say, exoterically theistic. If we're dealing with a naturalist who understands the philosophical implications of scientific knowledge, but who still doesn't see much horror in the world, the person may be a liberal secular humanist, a transhumanist, or some other kind of optimist about our capacity to make up for any horror, tragedy, or absurdity in nature. If you check my earlier references to transhumanism, I haven't ruled it out as preposterous. On the contrary, I've tried to explain how the "satanic" mission to replace natural processes with artificial functions, the absurdity of nature's monstrous impersonality with transcendent meanings and values makes for a responsible kind of optimism.

If you wish to insist on a mix of awe, horror, selflessness, and wonder, I'm happy to agree with you. As I said, I've been hammering on the horror aspect in reaction to the happy-talking new atheists who aren't nearly Nietzschean enough. But let's not be stereotypically postmodern about this; let's not be arbitrarily eclectic and relativistic in selecting our attitudes with full-on irony and no spiritual/existential commitment. We don't have merely a mix of attitudes or a mix of cultures. We have an artistic responsibility to make ourselves and our worldviews coherent, to have integrity and to create mighty works of art to redeem our pitiful lives. So the question is how the awe and the wonder and the horror fit together. Is one aspect dominant? I suppose I should take up this interesting question, too, in article form. Thanks for the inspiration!

Do I say merely that we must be “afraid”? No, the horror I have in mind isn't meant to stun us into inaction. It's not fear so much as a grim understanding that we're utterly and completely outgunned and yet we must nevertheless go to war against the dragon, against that headless beast whose girth goes on and on in all dimensions and forever.

Are we “stupid” if we don't understand this existential predicament? I'd say it depends on the proffered reasons for the disagreement.

Regarding the different kinds of mysticism, I take that up in the links below. The key question for me is whether the mysticism is anthropocentric or cosmicist.

Matthew - in Ben's defense, as a fellow long time reader, I've always felt he's made it clear his ethical position was that his work is an art piece or jeremiad, meant to illustrate his personal aesthetic judgement. Clearly it's very, very strident and I wouldn't have it any other way. That said, he always points out the mote in the eye of his subjects and the common tendency to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It's passionate, it's a rhetorical argument we have to be brave enough to face (if we're enlightened enough to see the ultimate lack of foundation to the meaning we construct in our modern lives). I don't think he's claiming to be an objective moral arbiter. We can submit our own counter-vision. I suppose we do one way or another.

I do think a convincing counter-vision/argument could be made for relationship, sexual and otherwise. I don't think I'm ready to make a good one in writing, but I agree with you, there seems to be room for authenticity, even though, as all the good tales in human history tell us, they are in some way doomed to tragedy.

I'm fortunate to have such close readers! This discussion has inspired me to take up these questions in article form, beginning with the issue of authenticity and sexual love. Some of my favourite writings I've written have been in response to readers' comments, so I'm always grateful for them.

Yes, I have spoken of RWUG as a work of art. Philosophy stands between science and religion, so rationality and objectivity are relevant but so are feelings of being swept up by a daemonic muse or of being attracted to a zeitgeist. In the end, our ideas can be seen as creations and can be aesthetically appraised. So of course I hope my writings might inspire others to create worthy pieces of art in turn. Those responses needn't be writings. Art can inspire us to look more deeply into life and to stop taking things for granted, to live with greater purpose.

There are cases where a belief can be objectively wrong or delusional. We can appreciate that when we're wearing our scientific or analytic philosophical hats. But when we take up the aesthetic, mystical, holistic stance, bypassing our ego and all hope of personal vindication, the world seems to me full of creations and counter-creations. There is a divine Artisan, after all. Only, she's undead and we're living inside her. We're in the belly of the whale and we can create a counter-world to testify that for a time, we came, we saw, and we did things our way. That's not ego, but life standing up for itself while it can.

"The author you continually return to pads his sentences, hoards pages and collapses on an idea in order to flatten it, to stretch it out. Poem, novel, essay, play – everything seems too long. The writer – it is his function – always says more than he has to say; he swells his thought and swathes it with words. All that subsists of a work are two or three moments; lightning in the dark. Shall I tell you what I really think? Every word is a word too much. Yet the question is; to write. Let us write… Let us dupe each other."

I may go on too long in some of my articles. They're not polished because I'm putting them out on a blog instead of trying to get them published by some elite publisher.

Still, that's rich coming from Cioran. I tried reading one of his books some months ago. I found it almost Hegelian in its use of flowery, obscure rhetoric. I think it's more important for writing to be clear than brief.

Here's a passage from his Short History of Decay, chosen at random: "The man who struggles to find the formula for the disease of the distant becomes the victim of a rickety architecture. To get back to the source of these expressions of the vague, we must make an affective regression toward their essence, must drown in the ineffable and emerge from it with our concepts in tatters. Once our theoretical assurance and our pride in the intelligible is lost, we can try to understand everything, to understand everything for itself. Then we manage to rejoice in the inexpressible, to spend our days in the margin of the comprehensible, and to wallow in the suburbs of the sublime. In order to escape sterility, we must wear Reason’s mourning…" (31).

It's not incomprehensible, but Cioran's showing off in the postmodern, literary fashion. That's actually the reason he might prefer short pieces, because he's writing prose poetry, not arguments. He's not explaining something only to criticize it by way of applying the analytic method.

In the above article, for example, I try to clarify what I mean by "Axial Age," and then I proceed logically to prove that Christianity is influenced by it, before I begin the critical section, showing how Christianity hides its origin. I could have condensed the article, but sometimes you need to provide details to support a controversial thesis, instead of relying entirely on rhetorical flourishes.

Also, I suspect our attention span is being shortened as we're forced to adapt to our technological environment, namely to TV and the internet. The more we multitask, the less patience we have for a sustained argument. I swim against that tide.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.